World War II Online is a Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter based in Western Europe between 1939 and 1943. Through land, sea, and air combat using a ultra-realistic game engine, combined with a strategic layer, in the largest game world ever created - We offer the best WWII simulation experience around.

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Everything posted by aismov

I think I every big benefit for any WWIIOL 2.0 is that there is 1) new development team and 2) CRS 2.0 has delivered on their road maps.
Crowdfunding is all about excitement and developing narratives. A WWIIOL 2.0 will general create excitement on its own, but people won't fund if they are wary of the people behind the project. I think that the "clean break from CRS 1.0" and willingness to make big game changes (1.36, etc) co struts a very compelling narrative that would combat any people saying "don't give money to these devs! It's the same group from 2001 that screwed it up in the first place!"
Im certainly more of an optimist but I think a well done crowdfunding push would be very successeful.

I'll echo what other players have said about the popularity of milsims and the WWII genre vis-a-vis fast action. If you take for example Hearts of Iron 4, and WWII based grand strategy game (the very definition of slow paced and methodical) it has sold over a million copies and has an average daily steam playerbase of ~15000 (which doesn't include organic players who purchased via paradox store).
There is a ton of potential to improve and get lots of players. Hearts of Iron is a great example where the premise is popular but it required iteration to keep players engaged. Had Paradox stayed at Hearts of Iron 1 or 2 the essentially same game would have nowhere near the same traction it currently has.

There is a big difference from crowdfunding small improvements in a current game versus crowdfunding a completely new game. The first only appeals to current active players, the second appeals to anyone who likes WWII games.

Yup agree here. If you coordinate and have a large strategy you can make big cuts, but we just really haven't been doing it on either side. Everyone is very risk averse with the new system. And as was mentioned all we need to do is adjust supply and the map can move much faster.

I disagree, I think the current change is one of the best in a long time. Why should capturing an AB cause the whole defense go poof? I personally like it how you now have to physically capture an entire town, just seems more realistic to me.

I don't necessarily see why crowdfunding is going to come from current fans. WWIIOL has enough of a large fan base who enjoyed the game at one point and certainly would get exited about at WWIIOL 2.0 and with a decent marketing push this could work to also capture a lot of other players who like the WWII and MMO genre.
Realistically this game would need to raise closer to $5-10 MM to be able to get things done in a reasonable time frame, which is a reach but doable if it is done the right way. That amount of money gets you about 15-20 full time developers for a good 3 years plus all the associated costs (assuming the a developer with full overhead costs about in the $150k/year range).
Even getting something like 50,000 people would get us more than half of the way there assuming they pledge $50 bucks. With some clever crowdfunding tiers you could easily get guys contributing much more, especially early in the development. Fortunately unlike lots of Indie games WWIIOL has some benefits:
1) established name (for better or worse, I think better)
2) popular genre
3) not niche product (sorta)
4) Dev team with established track record (again for better or worse)
5) maturing technology that makes the original vision more realistic to achieve than 2001

Issue with infantry game is lag and the way the predictor code is implemented. Some players have learned to use their own lag and the predictor code to their advantage which is where a lot of the "the guy ran up the stairs and shot me" phenomen comes from. I wouldn't necessarily call it an exploit, but yes, it does many the infantry game frustrating. Ironically the worse your ping the better your advantage if you are an attacker (and vice versa as a defender).

That would be a complete disaster... in real life the defenders had prepared defenses already set up. If you had players bring a tank or other heavy equipment from a rear FB it would be way to easy for an attacker to set up and lock down the town. Similarly we have depot spawning because in the first iteration of the game mechanics in 2001/2002 spawning only happened from the AB, so it was easy to camp the town and many tactics revolved around getting as many tanks as possible to rush the AB and pre-camp if before defenders had a chance to respond.

I'm surprised you are saying this since your join date is 2001... and we played this game for 5 years with no AOs or effectively any HC tools outside of a HC Forum, HC-affiliated squads, and the .Axis/.Allied chat command.
Somehow we managed to police ourselves and manage supply just fine. Yes, towns did fall because players used up too much supply. But towns have fall from innumerable HC and non-HC reasons... that will always be a fact of the game. I tend to be personally more skeptical at the idea of HC superiority vis-a-vis the playerbase. If anything if a fight is going nowhere, players will abandon it sooner rather than later and often it is battlefield leaders or HC pushing people on to stick with it. Personally I vote for the mob, becayse at the end of the day it is actually two competing mobs, and no matter what, each mob wants to win and will learn to adapt and improve themselves. With the HC leash-and-collar system players have no incentive to learn these things and just follow where the Red Boxes are set.

Honestly I don't buy that for a second. Everyone burns out on HC... its just too much work and dealing with the craziness of the playerbase takes its toll. I think its telling that if you look at the list of past CinC very few of them maintain an active subscription anymore... much less participate in HC.
And the CinCs were the most hardcore/dedicated within the HC structure and were able to deal with the nonsense that come with it better than most. The vast majority of KG commanders, and even Army commanders would call it quits after a few months, few lasted a year or more. Thats why the whole HC system imploded eventually. It was essentially a gigantic revolving door that relied on large numbers of new players cycling in to replace those guys dropping out and amongst the pile you would fine the crazy few (saying that in a good way BTW) who we're able to stick through it all to get to the upper levels. When that influx dried up... well, we know what happened.
I'm in the Luftwaffe HC but since we are so understaffed I do ground work essentially 99% of the time, and especially now where we don't have set AOs (compared to the old days) it is exhausting to try to keep track of the entire map all at once. There are simply too many objectives to keep track of to do a truly effective job; 1.36 made it MUCH easier, but without squads its up to the shoulders of HC to still do a lot of the heavy lifting to set up attacks and sustain them with FMS and do generally leadership duties.
EDIT: And lets also not forget that many in the HC are also pulling double duty doing a ton of work with their squads as well.

As others have said orders are already present prior to spawning in. Issue is that orders are rarely placed by Amal because from a gameplay perspective they are pretty useless (hence why nobody bothers).
Not to hijack this thread, but the real solution is to junk the entire mission system and move to a geographic click facility > spawn model where all you look at is a map with a green bar over each facility/FMS/AB so you quickly know the number of players spawned from that area.
What we have now is a legacy from the initial game design in 2001, and TBH it has neve worked and with FMS use now the problem are even more evident where you have no idea where the FMS that you are spawning into even is. It's the perpetual lottery of clicking on a new FMS abd hoping it not somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. Orders stating where the FMS is won't happen since we see now players already don't do that. An alternative system is needed.

I agree with raptor here. You guys are grossly overestimating time to combat with fighters. I can fly from Den Haag all the way to the British gm factories and get alt in 30 minutes... In a He111!
Edit: I would also agree limiting the flags to essentially only armor and a small number of support units. I think the number of flags is good right now abd wouldn't expand them farthur for the reasons raptor said. The same thing with planes, especially bombers which could make the RDP war a bit more realistic than the current one-way kamikazee runs (which I am guilty of as well).
Infinite supply hurts gameplay IMHO, and I think we have already with garrisons seen a new approach to battles with players more careful about wasting supply.

Perfect example of why the entire HC/brigade system desperately needed to cut down and simplified. There is a way to manually set fallback as well, but to be honest I forgot how to do it.
Expecting HC volunteers to understand these arcane rules (which also are very poorly documented) is just bad game design. Another notch on the old CRS 1.0 post I guess.

My understanding from the Rats Chats and the Forums is that the Unreal Engine work was just a very, very basic proof of concept. The main issue with using Unreal Engine is that you are limited in scale/map size based on what the game engine was fundamentally designed to do (i.e. designed for close quarters/small maps) and not huge open world games. This is similar to other commercial off the shelf engines out there (Unity, CryTek, Lumberyard). Although there are some companies out there that do large open-world type games like Star Citizen and use commercial engines (they used CryTek and now Lumberyard) but these engines are heavily modified. Others like Elite Dangerous created their own inhouse game engine.
FWIW my own view is that a WWIIOL 2.0 (which I highly support and think we should really start making some strides to vis-a-vis crowd funding) will need to develop its own inhouse game engine to deliver the type of gameplay (large zonesless world combining air/land/sea seamlessly) rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole with a commercial engine. I think the Star Citizen experience is telling here where they dumped the CryTek engine after years of work and pretty much rebuilt it using Lumberyard (which itself is a CryTek derivative).

I'll answer some of the stuff that hasn't been covered:
3) No, you can resupply from Dover to Antwerp if you are so inclined. I believe (but haven't tested) that you can also resupply into a pocket.
4) No, you can do any mission you want and resupply will still work.
When you successfully resupply a unit, on despawning and backing out of the mission you will see the green text that says "Unit X Manually Resupplied to XYZ Army Base."